Code of Conduct
All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our conference are required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.
EvoStar is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. EvoStar participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers.
Diversity statement (*)
Our goal is to create an inclusive, respectful conference environment that invites participation from people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions (or lack thereof), and sexual orientation.
We actively seek to increase the diversity of our attendees, speakers, and sponsors through our calls for proposals, other open submission processes, and through dialogue with the larger communities we serve.
This is an iterative process involving programme chairs and programme committees, aiming at improving the ways we can achieve it
Here are some ways you can help us build a more diverse conference experience:
- Recommend appropriate speakers and/or program committee members to the conference chairs (you may send an email to policy@evostar.org)
- Forward our call for proposals to relevant affinity groups with the message that we are looking for a diverse speaker roster
- Suggest ways that the onsite conference experience can be more welcoming and supportive, free from intimidation and marginalization (send an email to policy@evostar.org)
- Share your ideas and best practices for how we can realize our vision (send an email to policy@evostar.org)
We value diversity in the communities we bring together, and we welcome your contributions to bringing balanced representation of the richness of our collective human experience.
Ethics and integrity
The EvoStar conferences are committed to maintaining the highest level of integrity in the content published.
Plagiarism
By submitting a paper to an EvoStar conference, authors assert that it is their own work and that the work of others has been properly referenced.
Reviewers that suspect a case of (self-)plagiarism shall to communicate it to the conference organisers, who will take the appropriate measures.
A notable exception to the above is the simultaneous submission of work to arXiv. Reviewers will be asked not to actively look for such submissions, but if they are aware of them, this will not constitute a conflict of interest.
Reviewing process
In order to keep any personal bias out of the reviewing process, we enforce double-blind reviewing, i.e. neither authors nor reviewers know the names of their assigned reviewers or authors.
Reviewers that nevertheless perceive a conflict of interest in their assigned papers should notify it to the conference organisers and decline the review.
Awards
Best paper awards are accorded following these directions:
- Papers are nominated by chairs, who may follow suggestions given by reviewers.
- No papers that have an EvoStar conference chair as co-author can be nominated. Papers co-authored by Special Session chairs can be nominated outside their own Special Session
- EuroGP, EvoCOP and EvoMUSART BPAs are decided by public vote of the audience in the session where nominated papers are presented
- EvoApplications BPA is decided by vote of the EvoAPPS Steering committee, taking into account the main vote of the audience of the session where nominated papers are presented
The EvoStar Award, or Award for Outstanding contribution to Evolutionary Computation in Europe, is awarded by the SPECIES Comité des Sages, which consists of previous EvoStar awardees
The Best Student Poster Award is accorded by public vote to posters presented by Outstanding Students in the Wednesday poster session
The EvoStar Dissemination Award is accorded to the biggest contributor to the EvoStar Wikipedia page in the 12 months prior to the conference, outside of the conference organisers
(*) Credit for the original version of this statement goes to O’Reilly Media, Inc. under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License